‘A Community for Vulnerability’ Sermon by Rev. Won-Jae Hur, September 22, 2024

Homily Pent 18 (9.21.24)

Jer 11:18-20; Ps 54; Js 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mk 9:30-37

In Mark’s gospel reading, Jesus teaches for the second time that the Messiah must suffer and die before being raised again to life. Mark then connects this to his teaching on true greatness. The disciples can’t understand the teaching about the Messiah, and they also can’t understand the teaching on true greatness, because Jesus will find them arguing about it later in the gospel.

Why were these teachigns so difficult for them to grasp? Part of the reason has to do with the fact that society in first-century, Roman-occupied Israel was defined by the values of honor and shame. Honor was connected with a person’s status in a community - by birth, family, or profession - and the recognition of that status by the community. A person’s status determined everything - who they could associate or do business with, who they could marry, even where they lived. Honor was a matter of survival, sometimes of life and death. So the issue of honor comes up between the disciples, because they understand community life according to what was common in their world. Jesus’ response to their jockeying for dominance is not to settle the question by elevating some above others. Instead, he teaches them a different vision of community. In God’s community, the person who has most honor and status is not the one who stands above others; it is the person who gives them up to serve others.

Jesus then demonstrates what this means by taking and embracing a child in his arms. What kind of physical posture did he need to take to do this? He probably knelt down to where the child was standing and then hugged them. In Jesus’ time, a child had the same status as a slave. When Jesus takes the child in his arms, he is signaling that they are of equal status. But Jesus goes further. He says, “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes … the one who sent me.” Here, Jesus is not just putting himself and the child on the same social level; he is identifying himself with the child. A child in Jesus’ time embodied vulnerability. Infant mortality often reached 30%. 60% of children did not survive beyond age 16 (Malina and Rohrbaugh 1992: 238). So when Jesus identifies himself with the child, by extension he is identifying with every person who is vulnerable and powerless. When they welcome such a person, they welcome Jesus himself; and through Jesus, God’s very self (this identification of God with vulnerable and suffering people is a key characteristic of Jesus’ teaching as we see in Matthew 25). 

This gospel story reminded me of a Methodist minister I met many years ago named Hannah Han. She founded a church and a shelter in New York for homeless Korean military brides fleeing domestic violence. Most of these women would never go to a church, because churches and pastors would ask them to leave. They were too dirty, too disreputable in their eyes. When Rev. Han convinced some of them to attend her worship service, she asked the women to sit in a circle and put a large wooden cross on the ground at their feet. At first, many of the women complained. Some would say, “You can’t put the Lord at our feet.” One woman said, “I don’t want Jesus to get offended by how my feet smell.” But Rev. Han would say, “Churches and pastors may have thrown you out because they thought you weren’t good enough to be there, but read the gospel: Jesus came to serve you. He washed the disciples feet, and he will wash your feet too, because he wants to bear your burdens and help you. He accepts you and loves you as you are.” She created a space where people who had suffered so much, and judged as shameful by others, could let their burdens down and simply allow Christ to love them as they were. That community gave them a new sense of dignity and the strength to heal and rebuild their lives. 

We may not live in a society that is focused on honor as the disciples did, but we have our own equivalent. Our society, where the individual is paramount, defines people’s worth in terms of personal achievement, and people seek social dominance by displaying signs of their success. Ironically, as individualistic as our society may be, we are also conditioned to measure our self-worth by comparing ourselves with others - social media both reveals this and intensifies it. The problem that Jesus is pointing out with a community where meaning and identity depend on comparison and dominance over others is, there’s no space for people who are vulnerable; there is no space to see someone in the fullness of their being, in their uniqueness, as bearer’s of God’s presence; and there is also no space for our own vulnerability, because it doesn’t get us anything. He also goes further by placing vulnerability at the heart of his own identity as the Messiah. It is by embracing it that the power of God can be revealed, even in the most tragic circumstances, through what we call the resurrection.

We need to be clear here that Jesus’ teaching to be a servant of all and to be like a vulnerable child doesn’t mean to be the world’s doormat. The example of Jesus’ own selfless service to others doesn’t mean that we should simply bear all suffering as willed by God, and sacrifice ourselves the sake of others without caring for our own needs. Instead, Jesus embraced the child to teach his disciples to build a community that could embrace vulnerability in a turbulent and violent time. He teaches us that every person has worth by virtue of being loved by God, and it is our vulnerability that allows us to be in touch with this love. Because children and vulnerable persons remind us of this truth, they bring Christ to us, and they make it possible for us to love. 

In our time with its many social and political challenges, Jesus calls us to build a community where people have the space and the safety to embrace vulnerability with compassion. This not because being vulnerable and powerless are so good in themselves, but that they are inescapable parts of what makes us human; and vulnerability is God meets us. It serves as a portal through which God can enter our lives; it opens up space for us to rely on God and let God heal and strengthen us according to our need. Jesus teaches us that only by embracing vulnerability with compassion, rather than judgment, can we remain in touch with the fullness of our and other people’s humanity, and keep our capacity to love, even in the face of violent divisions and seemingly unbridgeable divides.